After conducting a year-long study of police shootings that resulted in death, the Washington Post is reporting that 965 people in the U.S. have been killed by police officers in 2015 — nearly three people every day.
According to the Post, only 90 of the shootings occurred when the suspect was unarmed, with the bulk broken down into three categories: the suspect was wielding a weapon of some sort, they were suicidal or mentally troubled, or they attempted to flee when officers ordered them to halt.
While the killing of unarmed black men makes up only 4 percent of the police shootings, 40 percent of the shootings involved black male victims — a grossly disproportionate number with African-American males making up only 6 percent of the population.
Attention has grown over those disparate number since the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson. The death of Brown helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement, calling attention to the perceived racism in the […]